SHOTGUN SINGER THROWBACK SHOW 1/22
Hi everyone, and Happy New Year I guess? I’ve been laying pretty low since the last days of 2020, but I’m emerging to play some music on the internet this Friday. It’s been an especially harrowing few weeks, even by current standards, and lacking much else to contribute I figured I’d offer up a moment of diversion in case anyone could use one.
You can tune in live Friday, 1/22, 8pm ET, or watch the archived show later on Facebook or YouTube. These are the facts, and I hope to see some of you there. If you want more nerdy narrative and photos from the making of this record, by all means read on.
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SHOTGUN SINGER came out in 2008, but the whole thing was such a journey that it’s hard to step back far enough to see the whole arc of it. I started writing the songs in 2004, but was quickly sidetracked by collaborating with dead poets, a tangent that eventually claimed my full attention and resulted in the 2006 album, Strange Conversation. Once that was done (but not released), I circled back and started working on Shotgun in earnest.
I set sail with a couple key concepts in mind. Although I’d had what now seems like luxurious amounts of time in the studio for my earlier records, I’d still become aware that recording on the clock, with a live band, encouraged me to stick to what I already knew how to do. Taking time to explore the unknown, to risk failure, or learn some new moves wasn’t ideal with a room full of people waiting and the meter running. With Shotgun Singer I would work on my own, to remove time and money from the equation and allow for maximum freedom and experimentation. I also wanted to track my guitar and voice separately so that my chops wouldn’t be the limiting factor on anything, and so I could sing the way I do with no one else in the room.
With a lot of advice and some borrowed gear from my engineer friends, I built a barebones portable recording rig. I needed a space for undistracted and uninterrupted work, and luckily my dear friend/neighbor/tour-mate Erin McKeown stepped in and offered her house, fondly known by us as La Petite Maison, as a live-in home studio while she was on the road. On a sunny day in March with the frozen New England landscape just starting to thaw, I loaded my car to the gills with instruments and gear for the short drive to Erin’s, rearranged her furniture to set up my tiny studio, and entered an immersive time of creative exploration and hard-working play.
The strategy was to take each song as far as I could alone, and only when I hit a point where I wanted something to happen that was truly beyond my skill or equipment would I bring in help. This led to a lot of improvising and wheel-reinventing, a few great surprises, and some hilarious failures. I made rhythm loops out of anything at hand, water glasses, close-mic’d corduroy, weird vocal sounds. I played a lot of bass, and while only one or two of the tracks ended up on the record, I found that framing the bass parts taught me more than anything else about the essence of a song, revealing the bone structure like an x-ray. It was all incredibly inefficient, in the most fruitful way: the slow, dogged slog towards competence.
I was deep in the land of solitude and didn’t interact with any other humans most days, but I talked plenty to myself, my instruments, the computer, the household appliances; especially my arch-nemesis, the fridge, which loved to ruin takes with sudden loud noises. I named him Frigo and the session files are littered with instances of me cursing him out. I was reading Virginia Woolf’s writing diaries, and her account of the lonely journey of creative work, the deep swings from inspiration to frustration and back, gave me a sense of profound companionship.
After three solo stretches totaling maybe four or five weeks, I was ready to bring other people into the process. The first was drummer Makaya McCraven, who these days is a star in the jazz world, but at the time was still a local secret. Justin Pizzoferrato engineered a session at his studio built into an old bank. Another day, I set up in my dining room to receive a small parade of visiting friends: both Peter Mulvey and David Goodrich played some guitar lines, and Barry Rothman came with his turntables and shortwave radio to play live samples in real time. At a later session at Spirit House in Northampton, Erin chipped in on piano and requinto, and later still a quick Boston session caught Kimon Kirk on bass.
The surprise plot twist came that fall, when I found out I would have a baby in June! Suddenly I had a hard deadline to assemble a full year’s worth of tracks, recorded in ten different places, into a finished record, all with a slightly foggy pregnant-lady brain. I was going to need reinforcements, so I enlisted Sam Kassirer, who I knew from Josh Ritter’s band, to help me land the plane.
Sam and I spent a very snowy January week at his Great North Sound Society, sifting through the tracks, pruning and arranging, adding various keys and vibraphone, recutting some strings and vocals. We made as many decisions as we could and then moved the party to Q Division in Somerville MA, where we mixed with ace engineer Kris Smith. Jeff Lipton mastered it at Peerless, and Paul Fucik did the design, which I still love.
Shotgun didn’t officially come out until April, but I started touring the second it was printed, mostly with my pals Winterpills as the band. We played shows across the USA, Europe, and the UK, February through May, the available space for my guitar (and my lungs) steadily decreasing as my belly grew larger. I got home just time to catch my breath before our daughter arrived in June, ushering in a new and entirely different chapter of life.
Looking back, I’m tremendously grateful for the journey of this album. It was the venue for learning and growth on many fronts, representing a huge step forward in terms of conscious authorship and artistic intention. All these songs have held their interest to me over the years. There’s enough space in them to accommodate motion, and enough mystery to refract new meaning over time. Ultimately, though, they’re about love in its many forms, and its power to transform and redeem us. If that’s not relevant to the current moment, I’m not sure what is.
I look forward to perceiving your presence over the internet this Friday and I hope everyone is safe and well.
Yours in the returning light, *kd
JAN 22- THROWBACK SHOW #4 - SHOTGUN SINGER
8:00pm ET/US on KD’s Facebook and Youtube
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